St. Theresia

Polsumer Straße 108, 45869 Gelsenkirchen

The Catholic Church of St. Theresia was built between 1958 and 1960 for the inhabitants of the new settlement, which was built in the immediate vicinity of the Kokerei Hassel in the north of Gelsenkirchen. It was the first coke plant to be built after the Second World War and went into operation in 1953, employing more than 650 people, for whom apartments and infrastructure facilities were created in the neighbourhood.

In 1957 a church building association was founded to build the new church, which commissioned the Cologne architect Karl Band. Band was an important church builder of post-war modernism and worked mainly in the Rhineland.

The church, consecrated in 1960, has been a listed building since 1999. It was closed in 2007. In 2015/2016 it served as emergency shelter for around 100 refugees. 

Under the roof edge of the brick building on a trapezoidal ground plan runs a zigzag frieze made of concrete. On the south side, the lower row of triangular panels is glazed, providing discreet lighting in the interior. In addition, diamond-shaped stained glass windows are embedded in vertical concrete strips to the west and north of the church.

Half of the high round tower is pushed into the western outer wall of the church and thus marks the Polsumer Strasse/Flachsstrasse intersection. Its basements served as a baptistery.

The Mary Chapel protrudes from the north of the cube. Not visible from the outside is the apse in the east, a semicircular, room-high concrete bowl in which a cross, designed by Marl artist Hermann Klunker, rises above the altar. An organ was installed next to it in 1967.

On the property are – beside the church – the parsonage, a sexton's flat, the kindergarten and an apartment for its management.